Ken and Roberta Williams, two of the most influential figures in video game history, are bringing the original 1976 text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure to virtual reality, as neatly as Mac and Windows PC.

It sounds fairly straightforward when I assign it care for that, legal? And then I remind you that the game in demand looked care for this:

Colossal Cave Adventure operating on a PDP-11/34 with a monitor.
Photo by Autopilot (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

And then I remind you that Roberta and Ken have been retired for the past 25 years.

And then I remind you that — while Roberta and Ken made King’s Quest and Phantasmagoria AND are credited with the primary graphical adventure game ever in Mystery Quest AND founded storied game company Sierra, which published all the issues from The Implausible Machine to Leisure Perambulate neatly with Larry to Half-Existence — they weren’t actually fervent with Colossal Cave Adventure, aka Adventure, aka Advent. It was merely the game that inspired them.

Ken and Roberta Williams in the early Sierra days.
Photo via Cygnus Entertainment

So this is a remarkable flip of occasions, to say the least, spanning almost 50 years of video game history from games you originally played on mainframes all the way to the Oculus Quest 2, history in which Roberta and Ken played important roles. But why? “Ken was bored, and I advised he write a e-book about Sierra. The approach of writing the e-book introduced back long-forgotten memories resulting in Ken deciding to learn Harmony and deciding to make a game,” Roberta Williams explained to PC Gamer.

I would say that I have no idea what to demand — if their contemporary company Cygnus Entertainment hadn’t already released a graphically barebones trailer that you can watch legal right here:

Cygnus currently has 12 rotund-time staff engaged on the game. “It has no longer but been obvious whether or no longer future games will be developed by Cygnus Entertainment LLC or if Colossal Cave 3D was a one-shot effort. Time will declare,” reads the contemporary company’s web page.

Ought to you’re no longer familiar with Ken and Roberta Williams’ seminal work, certainly one of their passe staff who goes by Metal Jesus on YouTube fair sat down with them for an intensive retrospective last week. I’d extremely counsel giving it a watch:

And if you happen to want to strive the original Colossal Cave Adventure (which may no longer technically be the primary text adventure game), you can play it on the procure legal right here.

Thank you for all the games, Roberta and Ken. I grew up with King’s Quest and Dr. Brain and Quest for Glory and many, many more, and I probably wouldn’t be right here if no longer for them.